I suppose it's a question of your personal ideology, I'm not saying that you're wrong, but I feel (and many people do) that a nation with an oppressive government should be dismantled and a new one created.
Yes, that's what should happen, but in actual point of fact, that's not what we did, and our actions show that we never intended to do that.
I would expect the same from the rest of the world if the US government all of a sudden became massively corrupt.
Too late.
As I've said, I may not agree with what may or may not have been the intentions. There is the clear possibility that Iraq was invaded to open up an oil market, maybe oil companies were even offering kick backs. It may be likely, even probable, but we must also remember that we won't know for certain for years.
Iraq was invaded (probably) because they were selling oil for Euros instead of dollars. Right now, and ever since the Bretton Woods arrangement in 1947, oil and other commodities worldwide are traded primarily in dollars. It's not that other currencies can't be used, it's just that they're typically not--the IMF is established in dollars so it's inconvenient to use other currencies. This is enormously advantageous for us because other countries, in order to secure oil, gold, and a variety of other commodities have to buy dollars from us--essentially, they finance the United States for the priviledge of using dollars. Iraq was undermining that arrangement, and Iran is about to start.
The point is, I agree with the results, but I don't delude myself into believing that dismantling a corrupt government was the only objective of our government. But I also don't delude myself into believing that Saddam was a good man. Choose the lessor of two evils, the president looking for self gain, or the torturing murderous dictator oppressing a people?
If that were all there was to it, I'd agree with you. But that's not all there was, or is, to it.
And? What does it matter whether the government likes us? If we give them a democratic government, and they use it, keep it, and in the future defend it, then I'm a happy guy.
In a perfect world I'd agree, but as it is, our actions there have severely swayed Muslim opinion when it comes to the United States. So not only did we commit horrible evils, this is something that the American people will be paying the price for in the future. The irony is that all that talk about a smoking gun qua mushroom cloud was patently false prior to the invasion; our actions have virtually ensured it will be reality. The point was that we've sown the seeds for more violence and destruction, future conflicts in which more innocent civilians will perish.
The Coalition did help set up a government, but it took longer in Afghanistan because of the lack of much of a discernible government to work off of.
The elected Afgani officials have little power in actual point of fact; the warlords are the ones in charge. And that's how we want it.
Iraq already had government, no matter how corrupt it served as a basis for the current government.
We did hire some of Saddam's folks back in (oddly), but I'm not sure why it would be more difficult a thing to do to design a government in Afganistan than Iraq.
Afghanis voted for the first time in 2004 didn't they?
They may well have, but it didn't do them much good. What did do them some good was our letting the Northern Alliance take over.
The estimates from the most liberal of sources from a year ago were 100,000, but since have changed to more realistic estimates. The most liberal being in the 50,000's, and the probably near 35,000. In contrast to 400,000 directly confirmed confirmed from actual remains in mass graves, and estimates that range to just under a million from the actions of the former Iraqi government.
Where do you get your figures? It appears to me that these statements are incorrect. See:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1263830,00.html
http://www.foreignaidwatch.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=810
http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2003/msg05091.html
http://electroniciraq.net/news/2006.shtml
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/012905K.shtml
http://www.unknownnews.net/casualties.html
http://www.mykeru.com/bodycount.html
Of course, no one knows how many civilians were killed as a result of our invasion. However, the 100,000 figure was a
conservative estimate by the British Medical Journal The Lancet based on tried and accepted statistical methodology. They used orthodox statistical analysis to determine their number, and it's based on their most conservative estimates--IIRC they actually excluded data gathered from Faluja from their results because it would have trebled their number to include it.
The methods they used are the accepted methods to determine deaths from epidemic or in a war. The same methods have been used and supported by our government many times in the past. But despite its statistical soundness, and seemingly because it shows that we've done something horrible, it is criticized by the right. As you may have seen in the last link, even if the more conservative numbers are used, it's just mind boggling. However, I think the Lancet number will turn out to be pretty solid.
But what's more interesting is that the 400,000 killed by Sadam is still floated from time to time. Blair was the one who started that, and later (as you will read above), he had to retract that figure. In fact, we've found about 5000 bodies in Iraq.
But I think the actual number in mass graves is probably much larger than that--we haven't really excavated all the graves and we seem to have no plans to (one wonders why). I wouldn' doubt, say, 150,000 people. The questions are, who are they, who put them there, and why. A couple sources of the bodies that don't implicate Saddam in a genocide would be:
1) The Iraq/ Iran war produced many thousands dead on Iraqi soil.
2) After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, we encouraged a Shiite uprising that we did not support. Saddam killed those rebels--there were something like 30,000 of them or so.
3) People killed during our recent invasion.
I have no doubt that some of the people in the mass graves are people that Saddam's government rounded up and summarily executed. I also have no doubt that the toddlers and children that show a single bullet wound to the back of the skull were executed by Saddam's forces. And this is, of course, despicable, and there's no question it should not have happened.
But we must be careful in allowing our emotions to get the better of us. It seems a worthy question to ask whether we've done any better. After seeing the films of our actions, after having read the interviews with soliders struggling with what they've done, and after having talked to soldiers who have returned from there, I have to say I believe we have not. And that is shameful.
Which do you not agree with? It's a country that just had a radical change in government, and had previously been government by a violently oppressive regime, what can you expect only months after the new government is set up?
Again, it's just not that simple. The government being toppled is the least significant development there. The form of a government is irrelevant when compared with the conditions it generates. Even those who argue that democracy is the best form of government don't do so on conventional grounds--the contention is that democracy actually does something good for people. But in Iraq, at least so far, nothing good has been done in the face of such catastrophic evil that I would be hard pressed to find a single argument to support our actions there.
I meant that the US government practices torture and murder to a much less extent that the former Iraqi government did.
I don't think that's known yet. I suspect, but cannot prove, that if all the facts were known we'd discover that Saddam's government wasn't as bad as we've been led to believe, and that the American government is far worse than we'd like to imagine.